Perl Receives Criticism at MIT Lightweight Languages Workshop
An article that appeared in Dr. Dobb's Journal discusses the MIT Lightweight Languages Workshop. The workshop was held at MIT's prestigious Artificial Intelligence Lab.
A number of passages in the DDJ article indicate that Perl was criticized by some attendees at the workshop. Perhaps this is to be expected, considering that the conference took place in an academic setting, and that attendance was probably dominated by artificial intelligence researchers. However, there is no doubt that Perl has been a highly useful language in many practical applications. It would be nice if languages were evaluated on their merits, and on the relative utility of the applications that have been produced with them, rather than on the basis of their lexical or syntactic purity.
There is a discussion thread on PerlMonks that addresses the workshop and the articles in DDJ and on Perl.com that describe it.